Pepper-Pot
This dish is peculiar to Spain, but it was imported to Jamaica, whence the negroes took the recipe north. In Philadelphia, there are several small restaurants, kept by darkies who are famous for pepper-pot. To 3 quarts of water add 1 pint of vegetables, cut up, any kinds, mixed, you happen to have, in equal parts, using beans, peas, celery, carrots, onions, rice, lettuce, etc., also potatoes, add 1 pound of mutton, 1 pound of salt pork, and 1 pound of honeycomb tripe, cut up and fried in butter or suet, 1 bayleaf, 1 clove, parsley, thyme, and sweet marjoram. Cook, closely covered, 3 hours. Set aside to cool, remove the fat, thicken with flour and butter and yolk of an egg, add salt and pepper, and serve very hot.
A long-simmered tripe soup written for a coal range and a cook who did not need to be told much. Two things decide whether it works: how the tripe is handled, and how the egg yolk goes in at the end.
- The egg yolk is the hingeOnce the yolk goes in, the soup must not boil or it will curdle into threads. Slacken the yolk with a ladleful of hot broth first, stir it back off the heat, and serve at once.
- Honeycomb tripeSupermarket tripe is already scalded and bleached, but it is rarely tender in three hours. Give it a separate simmer in water until it yields to a knife, then cut it up, fry it as directed, and add it to the pot. If it is sold frozen, thaw fully first.
- "1 pint of vegetables"A volume measure, not a weight: about 2 cups of mixed cut vegetables. Hold back potatoes, rice and lettuce until the last 30 to 40 minutes or they will collapse entirely; beans, peas, carrots, celery and onion can go in from the start.
- Salt porkModern salt pork is very salty and does not need the long freshening of a barrel-cured piece, but taste before adding any salt at the end. If it seems fierce, blanch it in water for five minutes and drain.
- MuttonTrue mutton is hard to buy outside halal and specialist butchers. Lamb shoulder or neck is the practical stand-in, though it is milder and cooks faster; use bone-in for body.
- Thicken with flour and butterThis is beurre manié: equal parts soft butter and flour worked to a paste and whisked into the simmering soup in small pieces before the yolk goes in. The recipe gives no quantity, so add it gradually until the soup thickens to your liking.
- Cool and skimThe instruction to set the pot aside and lift the fat is worth keeping. Mutton and salt pork throw a great deal of fat, and it sets firm in the refrigerator overnight, making removal trivial. The soup reheats better the next day in any case.
- Seasoning quantitiesOne clove and one bay leaf for three quarts is a light hand; the herbs read as background rather than foreground. Add the parsley late so it stays green.
- YieldThree quarts of water plus three pounds of meat gives roughly eight to ten generous bowls as a main course.
Pepper pot as sold in Philadelphia was a street and market-stall soup, hawked into the early twentieth century by women crying "pepper pot, smoking hot" — a tripe-and-vegetable soup quite distinct from the Caribbean pepperpot, which is a dark stew built on cassareep, the boiled-down juice of bitter cassava. The West Indian route this book describes is the usual account, and the Philadelphia dish is generally traced to Caribbean cooks in the city rather than to Spain, whatever the author's opening claim; the popular story tying it to a Continental Army cook at Valley Forge is legend, not record. What is documented is that by the nineteenth century pepper pot was a fixture of Philadelphia's Black-run eating houses and markets, cheap because it used tripe, salt pork and whatever vegetables were to hand — hence the recipe's instruction to use "any kinds, mixed, you happen to have." Its appearance in a book of dishes gathered abroad shows how firmly it had come to stand for one American city in particular.